Books, food, friends, and Virginia Woolf.
"I spare you the twists and turns of my cogitations, for no conclusion was found on the road to Headingly, and I ask you to suppose that I soon found out my mistake about the turning and retraced my steps to Fernham."--Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Wednesday, July 05, 2006

Post-partum

It’s my husband who used the term post-partum to describe my post-book slump and it’s true. I do have the odd moment of the baby blues but it passes, like a swift lonely little cloud. The book blues, however, have set in, complete with ominous clouds, lightning and thunder. Bummer.

This won’t become a baby blog, I promise, but I understand the temptation: I want to desperately to think again, to write again, but the book is off my desk now and the infant is a gobbler. Divine as she is, she does eat up my reading time most days. When I still had the book to finish, I was torn and distressed but that final push was focused and important and I could do it. I don’t have the stamina to invent or even really to enter deeply into the imaginative world of another.

Much television is being watched.

There are a million things that I want to write about and, in the middle of the night sitting up with the infant, I sit and think about what to say about HollabackNYC, the World Cup, how I feel like Lockhart (the Romantic-era reviewer not the Boston Pops conductor) when reading for the LBC, how finishing a book and giving birth are and aren’t alike but the tank is empty. It’s not just the book of course: the cumulative effect of three months without much sleep make my life and my brain function more interrupted than Virginia Woolf ever imagined. I can’t even be bothered to get the hyperlinks for these things…

On a day like today, when it’s horribly humid and the infant is only happy when she’s in the front carrier, plastered to my chest, I think that perhaps I can try to write standing up, putting the laptop on the mantle. Perhaps I can assemble some of these scattered thoughts into a complete one. The thought of composing upright immediately reminds me of Hemingway and I think, yes, “just like Hemingway!” and feel a moment of hopeful ambition, which, just as quickly, is clearly completely absurd and hilarious. I doubt Hemingway spent hours wearing a BabyBjorn…

3 comments:

Hey, you're allowed a lull in the pace here and there. A book, a toddler and a baby. Fantastic effort!!I must email you for the publication details sometime, Anne - I want to request it for a library here, so I can read it (assuming that as an academic title it's fairly expensive?) It's been great to read along as everything comes together for you.

Beautifully said! (And I feel incredible sympathy with your emotions, if not empathy. I feel that way after so many life events. And motherhood hasn't changed it one bit, just made it harder to plug through, what with lack of time for Self.)